Corrective Services’ South-West Region assistant commissioner, John Dunthorne, told the media, ‘It’s the work of a desperate man and Ivan Milat is in the top echelon of desperate people . . . Ivan is a control freak and his moods will fluctuate if he thinks he’s not in control.’ Dunthorne noted that Ivan would be ‘back in the Supermax by midnight tonight’. Woodham explained that he thought Milat was ‘very close to losing his marbles’, while others saw it as part of a plan by Milat to be shifted to a medical facility from which he could organise an escape.
In November 2010 the Supreme Court handed down its finding on Milat’s fourth application for an inquiry into his conviction and sentencing. The handwritten application raised various issues: unease over the reliability of the Crown’s primary evidence; the availability of new evidence; the fact that at his trial DNA evidence did not implicate him in the crime; and ‘cogent evidence’ of an alibi. Again, Justice McClellan found that he could not be ‘satisfied that there are special facts or circumstances that justify the taking of further action’ and refused Ivan’s application.
In May 2011 Milat went on a nine-day hunger strike after his request for a Sony PlayStation ‘to exercise his mind’ was refused. His weight fell from 85 to 60 kilograms. Commissioner Woodham told The Sunday Telegraph, ‘There’s no inmate on my watch who would ever get anything close to a PlayStation, particularly Australia’s worst serial killer.’
20
COPYCAT
Ivan Milat’s notoriety goes far beyond the murders he is known to have committed. The most famous image of him—sitting on a sofa in a black hat, holding a shotgun, with a rifle resting beside him—remains a potent symbol not just of what Ivan has done, but of what he might have done, and of what others might have done to emulate him.
On the evening of 12 July 1980 Deborah Balken and Jillian Jamieson, both aged twenty, went to meet friends at the Tollgate Hotel at Parramatta. They left about 7.30 p.m. Around 9 p.m. Balken called their Dundas flatmate, Sue Gilchrist, to say that she and Jamieson were in Wollongong with some of Jamieson’s former workmates, including the ‘gardener fellow’. Balken asked Gilchrist to call in sick for them. Jamieson worked at Ryde District Hospital and Balken at a local nursing home; neither has been seen or heard from since.
At first there were no serious concerns for their safety, but after they had been missing for a few weeks Eastwood Police and the Homicide Squad began an investigation. Inquiries revealed that both women were heavy drinkers and occasional drug users; that they led active social lives and were sexually involved with several men; and that they were regulars at the Tollgate Hotel. It was thought that both women had planned to attend a party on the night they disappeared. An employee of the Tollgate told police that on the night they went missing she saw them speaking to a man and heard them discussing a party in Wollongong. The women left with this man, who was a regular drinker at the hotel and ‘always wore a black felt hat with a broad brim’. Three months later, the employee said she saw the same man back at the hotel with two other men. After a minor disagreement, the man had threatened the employee, who told police that she was ‘terrified’. The man was known to be a gardener who lived on a property where large parties involving drug use were said to be held.
The police focused their investigation on the ‘gardener fellow’, but they were unable to discover either his identity or the address in Wollongong where the party had taken place. Known friends of the women were interviewed and reported sightings were followed up, but after about two years the investigation petered out.
In March 1998 a Parramatta resident contacted local police. She said that in 1980, when she was fifteen years old, she was in Marsden Street, Parramatta, with her mother when she saw a white sedan parked outside a doctor’s surgery. Inside the car were two women who appeared drugged or dead. Two men (she had a clear view of one) were leaning against the driver’s side. The woman said she not reported the incident because her father—who had since left the family home—didn’t want her having anything to do with the police. The mother made a statement confirming her daughter’s version of events. Under hypnosis, the woman was able to provide a detailed description of the car, the girls and the men, but the date she gave for the incident was the day she was admitted to hospital for an operation. A check of hospital records showed this to be three weeks after the day the girls were last seen.
Detective Philip Denmeade was put in charge of the reopened investigation. He interviewed Peter Flood, a person of interest in the original investigation, who was at Bathurst gaol serving a sentence for sexual assault. Flood subsequently wrote a letter to the police requesting a reopening of the investigation into the disappearance of the two women, who were old schoolfriends of his. Flood was said to be obsessed with Balken, although nothing was found to connect him with her disappearance.
Throughout 1998 Denmeade pursued the investigation, reinterviewing some witnesses and interviewing several new witnesses. He discovered that Jamieson and Balken socialised with a group that included several men known to be violent (at least one was violent towards women), as well as drug suppliers and drug users. By late 1999 Denmeade began looking further afield for people who might have information useful to the investigation.
Over three days in March 2001, Denmeade visited Sue Gilchrist, the missing women’s former flatmate, at her home in Lennox Head. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Eamonn Duff reported that Denmeade had instructed Gilchrist to pick him up from Byron Bay railway station, explaining that he didn’t have a police car because ‘the boys upstairs are not being helpful and the budget’s not there’. After questioning Gilchrist about the women and their sex lives, Denmeade asked to take a shower in her bathroom. Later he broke off the interview to ‘lie down’ because his computer was causing his ‘eyes to hurt’. He also told Gilchrist he was writing a book about the disappearances. An internal police inquiry revealed there were no records of Denmeade’s visit or the trips, and that these had not been ‘authorised by any person in authority’; at the time of the visits Denmeade had been taken off criminal investigation duties and placed on general duties at Parramatta. The inquiry found Denmeade’s behaviour to have been ‘unauthorised . . . inappropriate and unprofessional’. He resigned from the police in 2002.
In 2003 Parramatta Police reopened the investigation into the disappearance of Jamieson and Balken, with Detective Sergeant Ian McNabb taking over the case. In 2004 Ivan Milat was interviewed about the disappearances, but he denied having met the nurses or even having visited the Tollgate Hotel in Parramatta. He admitted, however, to having worked at Granville, about 2 kilometres from Parramatta, around the time the women went missing. Two years later McNabb referred the case to the New South Wales deputy state coroner, Carl Milovanovich, who in May 2006 conducted an inquest into the disappearances at the Westmead Coroner’s Court. The coroner observed that despite what had been said about the women’s social lives, ‘there is nothing to suggest that they were not close to their family and their friends and their work commitments. And it is highly unlikely even if they fibbed a little bit about being sick and going to a party, it is highly unlikely that they would not have returned back to work . . . And there is no way in the world in my view that they would have just simply disappeared off the face of the earth.’
Ivan Milat was named during the proceedings as a person of interest, causing Milovanovich to comment, ‘There has been a little bit of media frenzy about the fact that Ivan Milat is a person of interest. Unfortunately, his name comes up in every missing person’s case that I deal with.’ Milat was not considered a serious suspect. The coroner found that Jillian Jamieson and Deborah Balken ‘died sometime on or after 12 July, 1980’ but as to the place of death, manner and cause of death, from the evidence adduced he was unable to say.
After leaving the police in 2002, Denmeade moved to Queensland where he became a charter-boat skipper on the Great Barrier Reef. In early 2009 he approached Dr Rod Milton, the now retired profiler who had
worked for Task Force Air on the backpacker investigation. Denmeade told Milton he been investigating the disappearances of Jamieson and Balken and was convinced they had been killed by Ivan Milat. After being shown an endorsement from a senior police officer, Milton agreed to help.
Denmeade used Milton’s name to persuade Corrective Services to let him speak to Ivan in gaol. The head of Corrective Services, Ron Woodham, later told The Sun-Herald, ‘A decision to grant access was made following verification from both police and a leading forensic psychologist [Milton] who worked on the Milat case. That clearance was granted as an act of decency to two grief-stricken families desperately searching for answers.’ According to Duff, Denmeade’s application had included ‘words of support’ from a senior homicide officer. Between April 2009 and May 2010 Denmeade visited Ivan half a dozen times.
Denmeade told Duff that during his interviews with Ivan, ‘He now calls me a friend. That’s a development and I believe there is a very strong chance of getting a result.’ However, in a letter to a member of his family, Milat wrote, ‘[He] never gives me anything of substance, promises plenty, gave me two photographs of Mum & Dad and headstone.’ Milat was also talking about Denmeade to gaol staff and fellow prisoners. While he complained that Denmeade was conning him, the truth is that he was conning Denmeade. Ivan had no intention of confessing to anything.
Denmeade’s access was stopped when it became clear that he was not working with the police but was gathering material for a book. Having previously denied he planned to write a book, Denmeade now claimed to be ‘hoping it would generate publicity that might help crack the case’. In fact no Homicide Squad investigator supported Denmeade having access to Milat; those he had approached rejected him outright.
At no time during Denmeade’s investigations as a police officer had he raised the issue of Milat being a suspect. His suspicions about Milat appear to have originated with the man at the Tollgate Hotel who wore a black hat. Hearing about him had reminded Denmeade of the photograph of Milat sitting on a lounge wearing a black hat with shotgun in hand and a rifle at his side. The problem was, the man in the black hat at the Tollgate had been identified in 1980, not long after the women disappeared. It was not Ivan.
The Tollgate disappearances were reviewed by Task Force Air but, as with the Newcastle disappearances, while Ivan almost certainly had the opportunity, there was no evidence that he was involved.
On the afternoon of Sunday, 29 August 2010, ten trail bikers were riding through a heavily wooded area of the Belanglo State Forest just off Brethren Point Road, near a place known as Dalys Waterhole, when they came across some human bones. Emmett Hudson spotted a skull lying a few metres off the track. The group stopped, had a look and walked further into the bush, where they found more human remains and some clothing tucked away behind a log. The group had ridden the trail numerous times in the past without noticing anything.
They contacted Goulburn Local Area Command and local police arrived to secure the scene. The next morning the investigation was taken over by the Homicide Squad. Police and the media were already asking whether these were the remains of Ivan Milat’s eighth victim.
Forensic and other police spent several days searching the area, recovering the skull and numerous other bones, along with a clump of long hair. As speculation increased, Goulburn’s Superintendent Evan Quarmby refused to be drawn. Specialist officers sifted through soil ‘grain by grain’ (soil was put through a sieve, while sticks and leaves were sorted by hand) in the hunt for further evidence. Line searches collected items from around the area where the remains were found. ‘As our investigation proceeds and as we get evidence back from the experts in relation to sex, age and how long the body’s been there, that will allow us to narrow down some of those inquiries,’ Quarmby told the media.
Once again, journalists contacted me for comment. The initial reports made me doubtful that the remains had anything to do with Ivan. The body had been found in a part of the forest well away from the site of Ivan’s killings. Further, the physical conditions of the forest were different from those in which the backpacker bodies had been left, and the area did not have the isolation of the backpacker murder sites.
An examination at the Glebe morgue revealed that the remains were those of a female aged between thirteen and 25 years. A partly decomposed and discoloured T-shirt found with the bones still had enough fabric available to enable forensic officers to establish its original colour and pattern and its brand. It was possible the T-shirt held clues about the DNA of the victim or her killer, or even both. Potentially, it could play a crucial clue in identifying the remains, police told the media.
The bones were reckoned to have been in the forest for up to twelve years. Further investigation of the T-shirt found that it had been manufactured by the bicycle and garment company Chain Reaction and had been available for sale only between 2003 and 2006. On the front it had a rose and heart with wings and the word ‘Angelic’ in pink text. From this, the victim was given the name ‘Angel’. Police released an artist’s impression of the shirt, hoping it might jog someone’s memory, but nobody came forward.
Both the dating of the bones and the T-shirt ruled out Ivan as a suspect: at the time of death Ivan had been in gaol for several (perhaps as many as nine) years.
As the police combed missing persons and other records in several states, they turned to Dr Susan Hayes, a facial anthropologist from the University of Western Australia. Flown to Sydney, Dr Hayes examined Angel’s skull and used a sophisticated computer graphics program to reconstruct an image of Angel’s face. In December 2012 the Homicide Squad released the image, asking, ‘Do you know her?’ By this time police knew quite a bit more about Angel: she had most likely been a teenager when she died; she had been in the forest for seven years or less; she had shoulder-length hair; her remains showed significant signs of trauma—she had been murdered. ‘We’re hoping someone might remember her as being a friend or a neighbour, or even someone they recognise as having been a member of their local community,’ Detective Superintendent Willing, the officer in charge of the Homicide Squad, told the media.
In New South Wales alone, more than 50 women listed on the missing persons register matched Angel’s age range. After several of these were eliminated, police began to suspect the victim might be from interstate or overseas. In November 2012 Western Australia police announced that ‘Information received by police indicates the woman may have been a backpacker or worked in a vineyard [in the Margaret River region], and may have been of German or European background,’ but there was no firm evidence to back these claims and no new leads emerged. At the time of writing, police were far from a breakthrough, but had not given up on the case. A plausible theory is that Angel’s murderer had studied Ivan’s career and was a copycat killer.
On the evening of 20 November 2010, Ivan Milat’s grandnephew, seventeen-year-old Matthew Milat, eighteen-year-old Cohen Klein, David Auchterlonie, who had turned seventeen that day, and his friend Chase Day, aged eighteen, drove into the Belanglo State Forest. Milat stopped the car and he and Klein then killed Auchterlonie and hid his body, covering it with branches and surrounding debris, just as Ivan had done almost two decades earlier.
The next day Chase Day told his father what had happened and his father took him to Picton Police Station, where he told police about the murder of his mate. Day led police to Belanglo and Auchterlonie’s body. A day later Milat was arrested. He declined to participate in a recorded interview. Later the same day Klein was also arrested. In a recorded interview he admitted to driving with Milat and the others to the forest on the Saturday night, but claimed not to have known what Milat was planning. Later Klein changed his story, saying that Milat had been talking about wanting to kill Auchterlonie but insisting that he had paid no attention, believing that Milat was merely ‘bullshitting’.
When police arrested Klein they seized his mobile phone. At first there appeared to be nothing of significance on it, but when the fore
nsic team examined it they discovered a deleted video recording of the murder. Both youths were charged with murdering Auchterlonie. Both were refused bail.
It emerged that Matthew had been living in Newcastle with his then partner and their young daughter and working full time until September 2010, when he lost his job and moved into his grandparents’ home in Bargo, south of Sydney. Now unemployed, Matthew spent his days smoking cannabis—he had been using drugs since the age of fourteen—and drinking alcohol. He had a new girlfriend, Rachael, and spent much of his time with Klein, Auchterlonie and Day.
Milat spent Saturday, 20 November the same way he spent most days, smoking cannabis with his mates. But on this day something was different. Several times Milat declared that he, Klein and possibly others were going to the Belanglo State Forest that night to kill someone, that ‘someone’ being Auchterlonie. Milat told Rachael, ‘Me, Cohen and someone else are going to kill Auchto [Auchterlonie’s nickname]’, to which Rachael replied, ‘Don’t be stupid. Stop joking, no you’re not.’ Milat and Klein, who was standing beside him, laughed. When Rachael asked who the third person was, Milat told her it was Chase Day. Later, when Milat, Klein and Rachael were sitting in Milat’s car, Milat rubbed his hands together and said, ‘We’re going out to Belanglo. Someone’s going to die.’
Saturday was Auchterlonie’s birthday and he spent it celebrating with friends and family. In the evening Auchterlonie went to visit Day. Auchterlonie had spoken several times on the phone that day with both Milat and Klein. That evening Milat called Auchterlonie and persuaded him to accompany them to the Belanglo State Forest to have a few drinks and a bit of fun. Around 9 p.m. Milat and Klein picked up Auchterlonie and Day and drove in Milat’s car to the service station at Sutton Forest, a small village in the Southern Highlands. Auchterlonie had brought some cannabis with him. After buying a pair of scissors to cut up the cannabis, they bought something to eat at McDonald’s, then drove to the Belanglo State Forest. Klein was in the front passenger seat, Auchterlonie and Day in the back seat. A short distance into the forest Milat stopped the car. He and Klein got out and went to the back of the car, while Auchterlonie got into the front seat and started cutting up the cannabis.
Milat Page 20